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She took hold of my arm and I braced as she used it to pull herself to sitting up beside me. My chest hitched weirdly when she didn’t let go straight away.
“You prefer me out of my box?” she asked, and I had to remind myself what we were talking about.
I gave her a rough chuckle. “I don’t prefer you any way.”
“Is that not the same as saying you don’t like me?”
How the fuck could she have come up with that from what I was saying? That was definitely not the feeling I wanted to leave her with. I felt the frown harsh on my features. The urge to reach out and kiss every doubt from her mind almost overwhelmed me, so I was glad when she spoke and stopped me doing something stupid.
“You want to take a picture, Lombardi? It’ll last longer.”
Well, if she was offering…
I grabbed my phone and whipped it up to take a picture of her. The flash nearly blinded me, but it was worth it to hear her laugh.
“I wasn’t being serious!” she giggled.
“Well, you shouldn’t offer things you aren’t willing to give,” I told her.
“It’s less I was unwilling to give it and more I preferred to not be blind!”
“Oh, come on, Barlow. Think of the actual blind people in the world. I doubt they’ll take kindly to your complaining.”
She kept her eyes on me as her hand went to her pocket and I knew what she had planned. I gave her a crooked smile around the smoke in my mouth, then found myself blinking furiously.
“Okay. No. Fair. That is painful,” I laughed, rubbing my eyes.
“Ah, revenge is sweet,” she sassed and I couldn’t help laughing again.
“You at least seem in a better mood now,” I commented.
“I was in a bad mood before?” she asked, as though she hadn’t noticed.
I shrugged. “You seemed kinda…funky.”
“I wasn’t the only one.”
I nodded as looked over the lake. “No, you weren’t.”
“You seem less…funky now.”
She wasn’t wrong. “I am less funky now.”
She cleared her throat. “Um… Anything you want to talk about? Maddy’s…okay?”
While I was seeing new sides to her, it didn’t surprise me that, even when she was feeling funky, she was also looking out for other people. Even me, of all people.
“I’m not going to do you the disservice of telling you your life seems easy, Barlow. All I’ll say is that you probably know life isn’t always as simple as it can be made to look.”
“Fair enough,” she said with a nod. “If there’s anything I’ve learnt, it’s that no one’s life is ever as simple as you think.”
“Are you implying I have depths, Barlow?” I scoffed, thinking that was the stupidest piece of shit I’d ever heard.
“I wouldn’t dare tarnish your reputation.”
“In my experience, reputations are overrated.”
All they did was make people disappointed.
